Too Soon to Tell...

The Week in Training

It was a week of tentative steps on the training front. I started off by including a hard 3 minutes in my run on Monday, intending to get a little bit of that mile pace feeling. Instead, I sprinted for a minute and staggered along on trembling legs for another minute and a half, and then rallied to finish hard. On the basis of surviving that rush of lactic acid, I decided I'll be okay to run the mile on Thursday night.

Tuesday I finished my run with a couple miles of uphill running on the treadmill. It was a little experiment to get a sense for what the Mt. Washington Road Race may feel like. I discovered that running 7.6 miles per hour at a 12% grade is not easy. I kept the incline up the whole time, but alternated between 7.6 and various slower paces. Why 7.6? The Mt. Washington Road Race is 7.6 miles. If you run it in an hour, you'll do very well.

Wednesday's howling winds made doing a track workout seem wildly unappealling, but I met Paul G., Greg, and Lori Anne from the TC Running Co. team at Macalester that afternoon. They were game for doing the workout, so I got it in. I did 5x1000 followed by 5x200, a favorite workout of mine. G's fu manchu inspires me. Few could pull it off...

A couple of days of slogging around slowly followed. I'm pretty sure I didn't crack 8:00 per mile on Thursday. Friday felt a little better. While circling Brownie Lake, I ran into Zach Schendel, a former training partner and friend. He had texted me the previous night to see if I wanted to meet up for a run. I was probably already asleep, or in any case I didn't see his message until I came back from the run. Oddly enough, we met up anyway. I guess we're creatures of habit, running the same routes, at the same time of day, etc.

My longest run of the week was 16 miles, with quite a bit of it on the trails of Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis. The short, steep hills make for a great antidote to the unchanging flatness of running around the lakes. I ended the week with 75 miles, and a sense that my legs are slowly coming back to me. My foot continues to slowly improve through calf strengthening and stretching, the use of new shoes, and whatever other voodoo I can think of trying. I'm sick of sleeping with the night splint, but I have a feeling I had better get used to it.

The Week Ahead

This week...the TC 1 Mile and the Superior Trail 50k. Both will be approached as hard training efforts as it is still too soon after the marathon to expect much in terms of performance. Both runs should be a lot of fun.

On another note, on the trip to last year's Superior 50, I met a guy named Brian Peterson, whom I knew only as "The Younger" (or sometimes just "Younger") for months afterwords. I still forget his real name half the time. He hammered himself into quite a state of delirium that day. At the post-race lunch, the Race Director made an announcement that the soup was on its way. Younger, in his addled state, interrupted the apologetic announcement, yelling out "What kind of soup is it? Hey, what kind of soup!" We were a little worried.

Anyway, Chad Austin recently posted this great interview with Brian. Given that he just ran a 20 minute PR in the marathon, I'm excited to see how much faster he runs Superior this year. All I can say is that they better make sure that soup is waiting for the Younger at the finish line!